Blue Lily, Lily Blue (6 page)

dam was reading and re-reading his first-quarter schedule when Ronan hurled himself into the desk beside him. They were the only two in the navy-carpeted classroom; Adam had arrived very early to Borden House. It seemed wrong that the first day of school should carry the same emotional weight as the anxious afternoon in the cave of ravens, but there was no denying that the gleeful and anticipatory jitter in his veins now was as pronounced as those breathless minutes when birds sang around them.

One more year, and he had done it.
The first day was the easiest, of course. Before it had really all begun: the homework and the sports, the school-wide dinners and the college counseling, the exams and the extra-credit. Before Adam’s night job and studying until three a.m. conspired to destroy him.
He read his schedule again. It bristled with classes and extracurriculars. It looked impossible. Aglionby was a hard school: harder for Adam, though, because he had to be the best.
Last year, Barrington Whelk had stood at the front of this room and taught them Latin. Now he was dead. Adam knew that he had seen Whelk die, but he couldn’t seem to remember what the event had actually looked like — though he could, if he tried hard enough, imagine what it
should
have looked like.
Adam closed his eyes for a moment. In the quiet of the empty classroom, he could hear the rustling of leaves against yet more leaves.
“I can’t take it,” Ronan said.
Adam opened his eyes. “Take what?”
Take sitting, apparently. Ronan went to the whiteboard and began to write. He had furious handwriting.
“Malory. He’s always complaining about his hips or his eyes or the government or — Oh, and that
dog
. It’s not like he’s blind or crippled or anything.”
“Why couldn’t he have something normal like a raven?”
Ronan ignored this. “And he got up three times in the night to piss. I think he has a tumor.”
Adam said, “You don’t sleep anyway.”
“Not
anymore
.” Ronan’s dry-erase marker squeaked in protest as he jabbed down Latin words. Although Ronan wasn’t smiling and Adam didn’t know some of the vocabulary, Adam was certain it was a dirty joke. For a moment, he watched Ronan and tried to imagine that he was a teacher instead of a Ronan. It was impossible. Adam couldn’t decide if it was how he’d shoved up his sleeves or the apocalyptic way he had tied his tie.
“He knows everything,” Ronan said in a casual way.
Adam didn’t immediately reply, though he knew what Ronan meant, because he also found the professor’s omniscience uncomfortable. When he thought harder about the source of the unpleasantness— the idea of Malory spending a year with fifteen-year-old Gansey — he had to admit that it was not paranoia, but jealousy.
“He’s older than I expected,” Adam said.
“Oh, God, the oldest,” Ronan replied at once, as if he had been waiting for Adam to mention it. “He never chews with his mouth shut.”
A floorboard popped. Immediately, Ronan put down his marker. One couldn’t open the front door of Borden House without making the floor creak two rooms over. So both boys knew what the noise meant: School was underway.
“Well,” Ronan said, sounding nasty and unhappy, “here we go, cowboy.”
Returning to his desk, he threw his feet up on it. This was forbidden, of course. He crossed his arms, tilted his chin back, closed his eyes. Instant insolence. This was the version of himself he prepared for Aglionby, for his older brother Declan, and sometimes, for Gansey.
Ronan was always saying that he never lied, but he wore a liar’s face.
In the students came. It was such a familiar sound — desk legs scraping the floor, jackets swooshing over chair backs, notebooks slapping worktops — that Adam could’ve closed his eyes and still seen the scene with perfect clarity. They were chattering and hateful and oblivious.
Where have you been on break, man? Cape, always, where else? So boring. Vale. Mom broke her ankle. Oh, you know, we did Europe, hobo style. Granddad said I needed to get some muscles because I was looking gay these days. No, he didn’t really say that. Speaking of which, here’s Parrish.
Someone cuffed the back of Adam’s head. He blinked up. One way, then the other. His assailant had come up on Adam’s deaf side.
“Oh,” Adam said. It was Tad Carruthers, whose worst fault was that Adam didn’t like him and Tad couldn’t tell. “Oh,” mimicked Tad benevolently, as if Adam’s standoffishness charmed him. Adam wanted desperately and masochistically for Tad to ask him where he had summered. Instead, Tad turned to where Ronan was still reclined with his eyes closed. He lifted a hand to cuff Ronan’s head but lost his nerve an inch into the swing. Instead, he just drummed on Ronan’s desk and moved off.
Adam could feel the pulse of the ley line in the veins of his hands.
The students kept coming in. Adam kept watching. He was good at this part, the observing of others. It was himself that he couldn’t seem to study or understand. How he despised them, how he wanted to be them. How pointless to summer in Maine, how much he wanted to do it. How affected he found their speech, how he coveted their lazy monotones. He couldn’t tell how all of these things could be equally true.
Gansey appeared in the doorway. He was speaking to a teacher in the hall, thumb poised on his lower lip, eyebrows furrowed handsomely, uniform worn with confident ease. He stepped into the classroom, shoulders square, and for just a second, it was like he was a stranger again — once more that lofty, unknowable Virginia princeling.
It hit Adam like a real thing. Like somehow he had stopped being friends with Gansey and forgotten until this moment. Like Gansey would take a seat on the other side of Ronan instead of the one by Adam. Like the last year had not happened and once more it would be just Adam against all the rest of these overfed predators.
Then Gansey sat down in the seat in front of Adam with a sigh. He turned around. “Jesus Christ, I haven’t slept a second.” He remembered his manners and extended his fist. As Adam bumped knuckles with him, he felt an extraordinary rush of relief, of fondness. “Ronan, feet down.”
Ronan put his feet down.
Gansey turned back to Adam. “Ronan told you all about the Pig, then.”
“Ronan told me nothing.”
“I told you about the pissing,” Ronan said.
Adam ignored him. “What about the car?”
Gansey glanced around at Borden House as if he expected to see that it had changed over the summer. Of course it had not: navy carpet over everything, baseboard heating on too early in the year, bookshelves crowded with elegantly tattered books in Latin and Greek and French. It was your favorite aunt who smelled when you hugged her. “Last night we went out for bread and jam and more tea in the Pig, and the power steering went out. Then the radio, the lights. Jesus. Ronan was singing that awful murder squash song the whole damn time and he only made it through half a verse before I had absolutely nothing. Had to wrestle it out of the road.”
“Alternator again,” Adam observed.
“Right, yes, yes,” Gansey said. “I opened up the hood and saw the alternator belt just hanging there ragged. We had to go get another one, and it was just an absolute
zoo
to find one in stock for some reason, like there was a run on this precise size. Of course, putting on the new belt by the side of the road was the fast part.”
He said it in the most offhanded way, like it was nothing to have thrown on a new belt, but once upon a not-very-long time ago, Richard Gansey III had only one automotive skill: calling a tow truck.
Adam said, “You were smart to figure it out.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gansey replied, but it was clear he was proud. Adam felt like he had helped a bird hatch from an egg.
Thank God we’re not fighting thank God we’re not fighting thank God we’re not fighting how can I keep it from happening again—
Ronan said, “Keep it up, and you just might be a mechanic after you graduate. They’ll put
that
in the alumni magazine.”
“Ha and —” Gansey swiveled in his seat to watch as the new Latin teacher made his way to the front.
Every student watched him.
In his glove box, Adam kept a cutout advertisement for inspiration. The photo featured a sleek gray car made by happy Germans. A young man leaned against the vehicle in a long coat of black virgin wool, collar turned up against the wind. He was confident and snub-nosed, like a powerful child, with lots of dark hair and white teeth. His arms were crossed over his chest like a prizefighter.
That was what their new Latin teacher looked like.
Adam was badly impressed.
The new teacher swept his dark coat off as he observed Ronan’s handiwork on the whiteboard. Then he turned his gaze on the seated students with the same confidence as the man in the car advertisement.
“Well, look at you,” he said. His eyes lingered on Gansey, on Adam, on Ronan. “America’s youth. I can’t decide if you are the best or the worst thing I’ve seen this week. Whose work is this?”
Everyone knew, but no one copped to it.
He clasped his hands behind his back and took a closer look. “Vocabulary’s impressive.” He tapped a knuckle against a few of the words. He was kinetic. “But what’s going on with the grammar in here? And here? You’d want a subjunctive here in this fear clause. ‘I fear that they
may
believe this’— there should be a vocative here.
I
know what’s being said here because I already know the joke, but a native speaker would’ve just stared at you. This is not usable Latin.”
Adam didn’t have to turn his head to
feel
Ronan simmering.
Their new Latin teacher turned, swift and compact and keen, and again Adam felt that rush of both intimidation and awe. “Good thing, too, or I’d be out of a job. Well, you little runts. Gentlemen. I’m your Latin teacher for the year. I’m not really a fan of languages for the sake of languages. I’m only interested in how we can use them. And I’m not really a Latin teacher. I’m a historian. That means I’m really only interested in Latin as a mechanism to — to — rifle through dead men’s papers. Any questions?”
The students eyed him. This was the first period of the first day of school and nothing could make Latin class less full of Latin. This man’s fervent energy sank uselessly into mosscovered stones.
Adam put up his hand.
The man pointed at him.
“Miserere nobis,”
Adam said. “
Timeo nos horrendi esse.
Sir.”
Have mercy on us — I’m afraid we are terrible.
The man’s smile widened at
sir
. But he had to know that students were to address teachers as
sir
or
madam
to show respect.
“Nihil timeo,”
he replied.
“Solvitur ambulando.”

The nuances of his first statement —
I fear nothing! —
escaped most of the class, and the second statement — an idiom embracing the merit of practice, blew by the rest.

Ronan smiled lazily. Without raising his hand, he said, “Heh.
Noli prohicere maccaritas ad porcos
.”
Don’t throw pearls before swine.
He did not add
sir
.
“Are you pigs, then?” the man asked. “Or are you men?”
Adam wasn’t eager to watch either Ronan or their new Latin teacher run out to the end of their respective ropes. He asked quickly,
“Quod nomen est tibi
, sir?
”
“My name” — the man swept out a big swath of Ronan’s bad grammar with the edge of an eraser and used the space to replace it with efficient letters of his own — “is Colin Greenmantle.”

ere we are, living among the provincials!” Colin Greenmantle leaned out the window. Down below, a herd of cows looked up at him. “Piper, come look at

these cows. This one asshole is looking right at me. ‘Colin,’ says this cow, ‘you are really living among the provincials now.’” Piper said, “I’m in the bath.”
Her voice was coming from the kitchen, though. His wife (although he didn’t like to use that word,
wife
, because it made him think that he was now over thirty, which he was, but still, he didn’t need to be reminded, and anyway, he still had his boyish good looks; in fact, the cashier at the grocery store had flirted with him just last night, and even though it could have been the fact that he was overawingly overdressed for a cheese-cracker run, he thought it was probably his aquamarine eyes because she had been virtually swimming in them) was taking the move to Henrietta better than he had expected. So far, the only act of rebellion Piper had performed had been to wreck the rental car by driving it aggressively through a shopping center sign to demonstrate just how unsuited she was for living in a place where she couldn’t walk to shops. It was possible she hadn’t done it on purpose, but there was very little Piper did by accident.
“They are basically monsters,” Greenmantle said, although now he was thinking less of the cows and more of his new pupils. “Accepting handouts all day long, but they’d eat you in a second, if they had the right teeth for it.”
They’d only just moved into their “historic” rental on a cattle farm. Greenmantle, who had made plenty of history, doubted the farmhouse’s
historic
claim, but it was charming enough. He liked the idea of farming; in the most basic linguistic sense, he was now a farmer.
“They’ll be here for your blood on Friday,” Piper called.
The cows lowed curiously. Greenmantle experimentally flipped them off; their expressions didn’t change. “They’re here now.”
“Not the cows. I’m getting more life insurance for you and they need your blood. Friday. Be here.”
He ducked back inside and creaked down to the kitchen. Piper stood at the counter in a pink bra and underwear, chopping a mango. Her blond hair was a curtain around her head. She didn’t look up.
“I’m teaching Friday,” he said. “Think of the
children
. How much life insurance do we need?”
“I have certain standards of living I want to maintain if something terrible happens to you in the middle of the night.” She stabbed at him with the knife as he stole a piece of mango. He avoided a wound only because of his speed, not her lack of intention. “Just come right back after class. Don’t fritter around like you’ve been doing.”
“I’m not frittering,” Greenmantle said. “I am being quite purposeful.”
“Yes, I know, getting revenge, having testicles, whatnot.” “You can help, if you want. You’re so much better with directions and things.”
She couldn’t quite hide that the appeal to her ego pleased her. “I can’t until Sunday. I have eyebrows on Wednesday. Bikini line on Thursday. Don’t come home on Saturday. Fritter on Saturday. I’m having people come sage the house.”
Greenmantle swiped another piece of mango; the knife came a little closer this time. “What does that mean?”
“I saw a flier. It’s getting rid of the bad energy in a place. This house is full of it.”
“That’s just you.”
She tossed the knife into the sink, where it would remain until it died. Piper was not much for housework. She had a very narrow skill set. She drifted toward the bedroom, on her way to have a bath or take a nap or start a war. “Don’t get us killed.”
“No one’s going to kill us,” Greenmantle said with certainty. “The Gray Man knows the rules. And the others . . .” He rinsed the knife and put it back in the knife block.
“The others what?”
He hadn’t realized she was still in the room. “Oh, I was just thinking about how I saw one of Niall Lynch’s sons today.”
“Was he a bastard, too?” Piper asked. Niall Lynch had been responsible for seven moderately unpleasant and four extremely unpleasant months in their collective lives.
“Probably. God, but he looked just like that fucker. I can’t wait to fail him. I wonder if he knows who I am. I wonder if I should tell him.”
“You are such a sadist,” she said carelessly.
He knocked his knuckles on the counter. “I’m going to go see which jaw those cows have teeth on.”
“Bottom. I saw it on Animal Planet.”
“I’m going anyway.”
As he tried to remember which door led to the mudroom, he heard her say something to him, but he didn’t catch it. He’d already dialed the number of a Belgian contact who was supposed to be looking into a fifteenth-century belt buckle that gave the wearer bad dreams. It was taking this guy forever to run it down. Too bad he couldn’t put the Gray Man on it; he’d been the best. Right up until he’d betrayed Greenmantle, of course.
He wondered how long it would take the Gray Man to come to him.